Inundated with Squares and Blankets

As I write this I’m incredibly humbled by the generosity and amount of effort that people have put in to the Peggy Square Craftathon – which was our promotion in September, and we are still receiving squares and blankets in mid-November. Not only have many, many hundreds of squares been made and donated, but we have received numerous fully complete full-sized blankets from several of our fantastic crafters.

Lots of fun chatting and sewing squares

We had completely underestimated several things when we embarked on the Peggy Square Craftathon promotion –

The volume of support we would receive from libraries, retirement villages and venues

The volume of squares that would come in from so many wonderful crafters

The length of time we would continue to keep receiving contributions

The variance in shape/size of the squares

The time/effort it would take to sew them all together

Now while this underestimation has delivered a very positive result – we haven’t actually delivered much to the intended charities at this stage, because we are still putting the full sized blankets together. So far we’ve only managed to get blankets to two of our five charities for this promotion. Foster Hope were given around 35 snuggly sized blankets (because they were given to us completed), and Kiwi Family Trust were given several full sized blankets (along with some baby clothes – because Jane went to Christchurch).

However, we’ve got a couple more crafting sessions coming up in the next few weeks, where we hope to finish sewing up the last of the full sized blankets, so we can deliver them to the Women’s Refuge, the Night Shelter, and Give a Kid a Blanket, before the end of November.

Ain’t that the truth…

Huge thanks go to the ladies and men (yes – we’ve had a few chaps help out) who have come along to the “Craft and Chat” sessions to do the sewing up. Also huge thanks to those of you that have taken large numbers of squares home to continue sewing blankets together… and to those that have had their own private sewing sessions with friends at home.

Personally, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed getting together with people to chat and craft. All the great work that the “unofficial committee” did to arrange the venues and hosts for the September events, has been built upon, and given Crafty Volunteers the ability to continue with regular events and get-togethers. It’s proving a great formula, and we are very keen to keep promoting this concept out to other regions.

The team at Eltham Library in South Taranaki, are amongst the first to get things going outside of Wellington – they have their crafting session in the Library every Tuesday morning from 10am. Many thanks to Elisabeth for getting this started – I hope the group builds to a size that you can be making a great difference to organisations in your region.

I look forward to the next few weeks of sewing up, and being able to get lovely warm, colourful blankets to our charities.